


She’s Crafty

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Alternate Universe, Banter, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Het, Multi, Sex Magic, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-20 21:33:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6025860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Definitely not with sexy results.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She’s Crafty

    
“So I…sexy results? Really?” Lilah asked, looking inexplicably annoyed. Her usually coiffed hair was bedraggled, and there was some indication that she’d been neglecting the eyebrow tweezers. “I hate primeval magicks.”

“With a fiery passion only reserved for knock-offs?” Wesley asked. Lilah raised an eyebrow. “I used to squabble with Cordelia regularly, remember? It’s like riding a…”

“If you say the word bicycle, I will have you eliminated by a Colombian death squad,” Lilah snapped, glaring at the spell they’d just gained from the mystical brotherhood of the Xi’ao, who were based out of the Valley. “Just so you know.”

“Can I say it?” Fred asked. “No, really, can I?”

Ever since Lilah had inadvertently revealed Cordelia as the Beastmaster and precipitated her departure with Angelus in tow, Fred had been increasingly snappish toward their newest acquisition in the fight against evil. Wesley, who was not unaware of the difficulties Fred faced, truly wished that she weren’t so determined to provoke Lilah into some form of evil.

“You can,” Lilah said absently, looking at the list of ingredients. “I’m not entirely sure it’s a good idea, but if you feel the need, go ahead.”

Fred sniffed. “Why? Are you going to have **me** eliminated by a Colombian death squad?” she asked. Lilah paused in her work, rose to her feet with a pained grunt, and walked to where Fred was sitting.

“As a matter of fact, no,” said Lilah with her best evil smile, the one Wesley knew she wore to convince others she was a slightly lunatic sociopath with a perverse enjoyment of blood. “I’d just point out that there’s a certain intense tackiness in taunting a wounded woman over a man you’ve said you have no interest in when she’s helping you and rather notably **not** going after you, despite the number of opportunities she’s had to reduce you to tears or worse.”

Fred sputtered. “I…you…I’m not tacky!”

“Prove it,” Lilah said, returning to the books. “It would appear that Cordelia’s been possessed, according to my sources.”

Wesley nodded, intensely impressed at Lilah’s show of restraint. Fred had been downright childish, and Lilah’s rebuke had clearly reminded her of that. “My sources agree with yours. Do you think it’s tied to the First?”

“Pff,” Lilah said. “The First is too busy screwing around with the Slayer line, for reasons that make little sense. This power seems interested in corporeal manifestation, and you know what that means.”

“World domination, slaughter, possibly chanting in its honor to a drumbeat,” Wesley said. “How are you?”

Lilah gave Wesley a quizzical look. “Better now that I’m not, oh, bleeding,” she said. “Probably on the edge of anemia and exhaustion, but that’s why I’m going to save the world and then ask for a lengthy vacation with excellent doctors and Mai Tais.”

“And yet you still can make the quips,” Fred said, blinking rapidly. Very rapidly. “After six weeks of living in the sewers. Bleeding out. Regularly. With the ability to…”

Wesley and Lilah both swiveled, with the innate grace of a couple who knows each other all too well, broken up or not. Fred was doing math, higher physics, and cosmology in her head, which meant her fingers were dancing in the air as she muttered things in some dialect wholly her own. Clearly, she was not with them.

“Did I break her?” Lilah asked. “I mean, I know I’m whore-tastic as compared to the virginal goodness, but I was fairly serious about the vacation.”

Wesley shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I just work here,” he said. “Gunn and Connor should be coming in from patrol soon. And hopefully Lorne’s finished the sanctuary spell.”

“Are you entirely certain you’re human?” Fred asked Lilah. “Or that Wolfram and Hart didn’t do any modifying?”

“Why?” Lilah said suspiciously, her hand on her side.

“There’s something not adding up,” Fred said. “Not about you and not about Cordelia. Why would she kill you?”

Lilah shrugged. “Jealousy?” she asked.

“Assume smart demon thing,” Fred said, clearly irritated at the quippage. “I’m serious. This thing has covered its tracks very well. It manipulated us into bringing back Angelus after erasing itself from this dimension. It took out the sun, Wolfram and Hart LA, and managed to do a credible Cordelia after convincing her that she was doing the **right** thing by becoming a higher being.”

“She was trying to get Angelus to kill me,” Lilah said.

“Well, again, question,” Fred said, clearly thinking very fast. “Why didn’t the Beast kill you? And why haven’t the ten bazillion vampires in town for Darkapalooza gone after the stench of fresh-flowing blood in the sewer? And when Angelus failed to get you, why was she so hell-bent on killing you?”

Lilah was very, very still. “I don’t like where this is going,” she said. “As much as I’m fond of myself, you’re implying a destiny-type thing, which is no good at all.”

“I think we need to find Wolfram and Hart records,” Wesley said. “If there is anything, they’d be there.”

“Right,” said Lilah. “Because such a thing never occurred to me while I bled and occasionally hallucinated in the sewers.”

Wesley and Fred gave her an exasperated pair of sighs. “We could try Lorne,” Fred finally said, looking at the dirty, ponytailed lawyer with consternation. “If there’s something in her aura, he’ll hear it.”

Lorne, for his part, was as skeptical as Lilah when she was duly dragged into his presence. “And when was the last time that the level boss was more important than that, kids?” he asked. “Last I checked, the stigmatic was the emergency backup lawyer done good, right?”

“Exactly,” Lilah said. “If Lindsey had a spine, I’d be dog food. Literally. I guess Drusilla must have smelled that on him in the wine cellar.”

“Drusilla?” Wesley asked, and Lorne groaned. “Any more revelations, Miss Morgan?”

“I cannot think of a one,” Lilah said. “So I sing, Lorne tells me I’m still just the cosmic Pippin and we go back to work, right?”

Lorne snorted. “The cosmic Pippin? Try the cosmic Grima Wormtongue,” he said. “Come on, let’s hear that voice.”

“I see,” Lilah said, rolling her eyes and then realizing she didn’t remember a single song. Closing her eyes, she tried to find one. Just one. And then started humming.

Couldn’t remember the words. Oh, wait, there were some, “I heave a sigh of pain!” and ooh, more. “Every time I see your face I think of things impure unchaste…”

“Oh, fuck,” Lilah said, opening her eyes. Wesley had started to choke and Fred was looking distressed. “It was the only song that came to mind.”

“Not you,” Fred said, pointing at Lorne. He looked positively aghast. “Lorne?”

He glowered at Lilah. “You! And your destiny!” he said. “Looks like we need to keep Evil McBeal alive, given that she’s about the only person whose ego is big enough to withstand the thing in Cordy.”

“And that means what, exactly?” Fred asked.

“I mean that there’s a crossroads coming up,” Lorne said. “Good and evil don’t quite mean the same thing they used to, not when a trip to the higher realms leaves you with evil inside, Angelus is our way out of the dark, et cetera. Apparently, Miss Thing’s part of that.”

Lilah looked annoyed. “Wow, that’s a ringing assessment of my potential for heroism,” she said. “How do I stop the upcoming apocalypse, huh? Do I bleed on Cordy? Maybe I outsass her while Wes takes Angelus by himself?”

“I think perhaps not,” Wesley said wryly. “You were closer when you were thumbing through this miscellany.”

Lilah looked at Fred and sighed. “You know, sex magicks are almost **always** a bad idea. People who have no business seeing each other naked end up covered in fluids and then it just gets professionally awkward.”

Wesley sighed. “And yet we’re all quite agreed that the end of the world is much more awkward than a threesome,” he said. “Aren’t we?”

Fred and Lilah exchanged the first and probably only sympathetic glance they would ever share. “Does it really say that?” Fred asked, diving toward the book. “It does.”

“And I bet it specifies two women and one man,” Lilah said snappishly. “Primeval magicks. So much hate.”

* * *

 

In retrospect, Wesley felt it could have gone much, much worse, especially given the amount of taunting Lilah and Fred had given him about his certainty that Fred was being somehow violated by the magic.

“Oh, I knew it!” Lilah had said triumphantly when Fred had pointed out her sexual history. “Mostly gay, kind of slutty. We can smell our own. Well…” pointed glance at Wesley. “Those of us without overdeveloped madonna/whore complexes, that is.”

Lilah was currently stretched out on a mattress, having her gut wound stitched up by a doctor friend of Gunn’s, who was equally confused at Lilah’s continued health.

“I think it’ll heal up fast, but don’t go running around in the sewers. And watch the athletic sex, ma’am,” Dr. Aaronsen said, as some sort of final statement. He withdrew, leaving Wesley outlined in the door, looking troubled.

“I don’t have any more fluids right now,” Lilah said. “I’m supposed to drink water, look at the ceiling, and let myself heal up. Of course, I bet you’re about to tell me that we need my blood to satisfy the gods, right?”

“Not right now,” Wesley said, sitting down in the chair. “What are we going to do?”

Her eyebrow rose at the word “we” as he knew it would. “I am going to try to heal,” Lilah said, hand on stomach. “You are going to stop Angelus and Evil-delia, with the help of the crazy Slayer Gunn’s gone to get. There is no unity here.”

“Once we succeed, we’ll be able to contact Wolfram and Hart,” Wesley said. “If that’s what you want.”

Lilah smiled, clearly tired. She’d been the only one of them to have been involved in sex magicks before — “I went to Wellesley,” she said cheerfully, describing one of the rituals they’d done for good grades. “You would not believe what goes down. Besides every student.” Also, Fred had seemed rather intent on matching Lilah’s sexual prowess, which had escalated the magick into one of the most intense experiences Wesley had ever been entangled in.

“Wes, I don’t know what I want,” she said flatly. “No evil schemes. No remorse, either, but I’m not plotting betrayal from my sickbed. I’m tired. I fucked Fred, which was on my top ten list of things I’d do when Hell froze over. You people think I have a destiny.”

“We all have a destiny, Lilah,” Wes said, smiling at her exasperation. “Yours is apparently more complicated than Evil Overlord #4.”

“And if you didn’t realize **that** before, you’re clearly dumber than you appear,” said Lilah waspishly. “Please, Wes, leave me alone. Now is not the time.”

She meant it. Wesley, unsettled, got up, and walked outside the room, where Fred was waiting, arms folded and expression absolutely unreadable.

“You’re still freaked out that she could die,” Fred said. “Did you tell her that’s why you’re doing the hovering thing? It might calm down the wild beast. Then again, that could be why Lorne’s trying to score some Valium.”

“Indeed,” Wesley said uncomfortably. “So, are you…are we? Fred, why do you keep looking at me like that?”

“Because you’ve got feelings for the evil thing,” she said. “And I find myself approving. Not because of the evil. I disapprove of the evil still. However, I approve of the Wes I’m seeing. A lot. So this is very complicated, because I don’t like her. She makes me feel flat-chested and dorky.”

Wesley nodded. “Do you think Gunn and Faith are getting along?” he asked, apropos of nothing except a firm desire to change the subject. Fred giggled.

“Oh, I **bet** they are,” she said. “Smart move, sending him up. But anyway. I have to go on watch now, so. I don’t know. Get some sleep. The end of the world is no time to worry about love.”

She slipped away. Wesley stared after her, and the magically closed door to Lilah’s room. Sighed. Went to find an empty room, because they were both right. The end of the world was no time to debate romance.

 


End file.
